I spend most of my time in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, as the Dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Working with a terrific group of colleagues to shape a business school for the future, I have an opportunity almost every day to try out some of my ideas about leading and energizing talented knowledge professionals and experts. In my spare time, I look for new and fun projects to work on. I am active with research, write a book now and then, and collaborate with executives in different industries on projects such as strengthening a firm’s leadership ranks, igniting teamwork, creating new strategies, and stimulating innovation in challenging bureaucratic settings. To learn more, visit me on my website, http://andrewboynton.com/. Before coming back to Boston College (I am a proud alum), I spent over ten years at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland—simply the best executive education institute in the world—leading executive education programs and founding their global Executive MBA program. I also was a faculty member of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where I also earned my MBA and PhD) and taught at the University of Virginia’s Darden School. I now live in Concord, Massachusetts, with my wife Jane. Our four sons—Evan, Ian, Dylan, and Owen—are at college or in their early career stages hunting for ideas that will create their futures.

When Innovating, Location Matters

This time of year, especially in chillier climes, many people who huddle together indoors worry about the spread of viruses and other pathogens. There’s a sort of germ, however, that moves about rapidly in close physical proximity and with beneficial results for our economic health. And this is, according to mounting evidence, the germ of innovation—ideas.

The people who produce weekly television dramas and comedies have known this for decades. The scripts for those shows are typically crafted in what are called “writers rooms,” often a hotel room where the writing staff hammers out ideas for episodes. On many shows, writers spend most of their time crowded together in that one room, working elbow to elbow.

In the music industry, one of the most serious cases of idea contagion occurred in the early 1960s when a coterie of then-unknown songwriters including Carole King, Neil Sedaka, and Neil Diamond cranked out hit after pop hit. They rubbed shoulders in a storied place called the Brill Building on Broadway in Manhattan.

Scientists too have found that the best ideas are especially contagious in close quarters. In the January 30 edition of The New Yorker, author Jonah Lehrer reports on a massive study released last year by Harvard Medical School researcher Isaac Kohane, who examined more than 35,000 peer-reviewed papers. He and his many assistants figured out exactly where the authors were physically located in relation to each other, and correlated this data to the number of citations their papers received—a standard measure of quality.

“Once the data was amassed, the correlation became clear,” Lehrer summarizes. “When coauthors were closer together, their papers tended to be of significantly higher quality. The best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within ten metres of each other; the least cited papers tended to emerge from collaborators who were a kilometre or more apart.” (The magazine prefers the British spellings of those units of length.)

Some people have referred to this as the water-cooler effect. Kohane was quoted as saying: “If you want people to work together effectively, these findings reinforce the need to create architectures that support frequent, physical, spontaneous interactions.” That’s important even in an age when scientists do so much of their work on the Internet, he added.

Creating Idea Spaces at Pixar

Among his other well-known attributes, Steve Jobs understood the importance of such architectures. As the owner of Pixar Animation Studios (which he cofounded in 1986), he set his sights on redesigning Pixar’s main building in Emeryville, California.

Jobs wanted to ratchet up the odds of people interacting with each other, so he built a large atrium in the middle of the building. Rumor has it that his original design called for just one bathroom in the entire building, in the interest of fa­cilitating further idea-exchange, but Pixar staff rebelled against this particular innovation.

When the building opened in 2000, some saw the atrium as a waste of space. But Brad Bird, who directed Ratatouille and The Incredibles, among other Pixar films, explained in aMcKinsey Quar­terly interview in 2008:

The reason [Steve Jobs] did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

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